Polar tanks

Description

The original idea was to have a clone of classic video game scorched earth . In the original game it may matter if the player is placed near the edges of the screen. To avoid this, we simply used a polar coordinate system. Of course this introduced a new problem. As explosions remove more and more soil, tanks fall down; what happens at negative heights or in the center of the planet? To make things simpler, there's a minimal radius defined and explosions never affect soil under that radius. We also wanted to ensure the game is played by AIs, or at least semi-automatic programs, thus we choose low timeout values.

The game actually consists of two different games: a shooting and a trading game. For shooting, we expected teams would either try to reverse engineer the physics or go for the simple "brute force" solution of binary search with the cheapest missile. The later approach is even easier if there's not a specific target, as the planet was rather crowded with all the tanks of 30 teams - a cleverly chosen random shoot would almost always land somewhere near a tank.

We expected that teams would trade much more with other teams. Since a team can not lose money during a battle, in theory, the team could gain a lot of score by only trading and ignoring battles. Unfortunately this did not happen and teams went on racing for the offers by our trade bot and bought only as much weapons as they needed for the next battle.

An important aspect of the game was exploring. We didn't want to have an "exact problem", or in other words we didn't specify all the constants and formulas of our physics. Instead, we wanted the teams to find out by trial and error or by just looking at the result of other players' actions. Same applies for the weapons. The only trap, the only weapon that didn't do anything useful was cat. SDD, the Self Destruction Device may seem to be a trap too, but it does have its tactical value and at least one team found this out during the contest.

We thought there were a 3rd game hidden behind the above two, but I am not sure if anyone really played that. This game is about the strategy used for choosing an enemy. At the end of a campaign, only rank matters and the differences in benefits are big in case of the first 4 ranks. It may have been a clever strategy to always aim at the teams that are close to the current team in rank, to avoid the next worse team to catch up and to kill the tank of the next best team to lose position.